Heath Johnson, who has spent more than seven years overseeing two Texas markets for an office real estate investment trust, is moving into the industrial side of the business in a big way.
This week, Johnson joined Prologis, the world's largest industrial REIT, as senior vice president and Dallas market officer. He replaced Jacob Milligan, who was promoted in January to head of operations for Prologis' central region.
In his new role, Johnson will manage Prologis' Dallas operations with 40 million square feet of space across North Texas. The REIT has approximately 65 employees in the market.
"I was drawn to this company because of the quality of the PLD team, the customer-centric approach to business and the market-leading innovation," Johnson said in a statement provided by Prologis. "I look forward to hitting the ground running."
Johnson joined Prologis from Atlanta-based Cousins Properties, where he most recently served as leader of the REIT's Dallas and Houston offices. In that role, he led a 100-person team and oversaw a portfolio of 16 million square feet of office space across 13 cities.
Cousins would not say whether it had plans to replace Johnson as Dallas market leader because, spokesperson Melissa McNamara said in an email, the company doesn’t comment on personnel.
Dallas is Prologis' sixth-largest market based on square footage and net operating income, according to supplemental information provided with its second-quarter earnings report.
Johnson takes over Prologis' Dallas market as it's poised to get bigger. In June, Prologis said it reached an agreement to acquire Duke Realty Corp. in an all-stock deal valued at $26 billion.
If the acquisition closes as expected in the fourth quarter, the size of Prologis' Dallas portfolio would increase to approximately 56 million square feet, according to an investor presentation released when the acquisition was announced. That would position Dallas as Prologis' third-largest market, behind Southern California and Chicago.
Johnson is no stranger to working through major mergers and acquisitions. He was an executive at Tier REIT when Cousins Properties acquired it in 2019. As part of Tier's management team, he helped reposition it as a public REIT in 2015.
Before that, Johnson worked for 15 years at global commercial property firm Hines, where he started as a property manager. He worked his way up to become a managing director in 2013. In that role, Johnson oversaw Hines' development, acquisition and asset management in the Dallas-Fort Worth market.